Word: khrushchevism
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During a meeting about the De Gaulle visit, I was struck by the contrast between Brezhnev and Khrushchev. Brezhnev's well-tailored suit, an elegant shirt with French cuffs and a pretentiously mannered style were very far from Khrushchev's baggy clothes and hearty, unaffected approach. Brezhnev exuded smug self-confidence, but he was also pleasant and cordial. After some small talk he slowly read the material prepared by us. I sensed in his platitudinous observations about our proposals that he was not sure what he was talking about...
...Unlike Khrushchev, Brezhnev seemed to have no ideas of his own to contribute. He seemed to dramatize the truth of another joke making the rounds: "There can be no personality cult where there is no personality." Brezhnev was certainly no visionary, or even an intellectual. His strength was ^ that he was a man of unusual organizational ability. He also had a gift for compromise and was adept at maintaining a fine balance among different--even opposing--forces. He was an uninspiring leader whose illusion of strong and steady helmsmanship was mainly a scaffolding built by his subordinates...
Almost immediately, nearly everyone's attention was focused on Poland and Hungary. In October, Wladyslaw Gomulka had been elected First Secretary of the Polish party's Central Committee in defiance of the Soviets. Khrushchev and other leaders felt constrained to accept Gomulka because they were loath to suppress the Poles by force. "You know," a friend in the Foreign Ministry told me, "the Poles hate us; they would fight at the drop of a hat." I knew it was true. Still, there was no danger that Poland could break away from...
...third secretary, was to monitor the disarmament negotiations then taking place in London under the auspices of the U.N. I was convinced that the Soviet Union was more interested in disarmament than the U.S. was. So was the First Secretary of the party, Nikita Khrushchev. The head of our department, Tsarapkin, told me that Khrushchev was very bitter that at the London negotiations, there had been sudden changes in the American position, and the U.S. had withdrawn what our side considered a significant concession...
...that time, Khrushchev was facing opposition at home. The Stalinists who survived the purges of the '30s were the sternest guardians of Communist doctrine, and they often grumbled about Khrushchev. One of them was Tsarapkin's deputy and my superior, Kirill Novikov. Along with Tsarapkin, Novikov had sat behind Stalin during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. He would reveal himself in the way he reminisced: "In Stalin's time we had real order. There were none of these rhetorical flourishes and vacillations." Moscow was rife with gossip about intrigues. A clique in the Presidium (Khrushchev's name for the Politburo...